


To Use a Crane to Crush a Fly

by theshipsfirstmate



Series: We Need to Talk About Thea [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Queen siblings, post 4x01, sorry for the angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 10:39:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4957138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Something’s wrong with Thea.” </p><p>It's not easy being back, but Oliver's not the only Queen struggling with darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Use a Crane to Crush a Fly

_A/N: Mentions of mental illness, and it’s a little dark. Not at all offended if you take a pass. Really sorry for bringing angst to the 4x01 fluff party. (Title from[“Waiting For Superman”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKiVSuDEF2c) by The Flaming Lips.)_

**To Use a Crane to Crush a Fly**

It’s not easy, being back.

They fall back into things smoothly enough in the new Star City, which is very nearly the polar opposite of the twinkling ball of light its name seems to suggest. Felicity’s happier, which always pulls him in the right direction, even when he realizes it means he really was too doped out on suburbia and slow-cookers to realize that she had been miserable in Ivy Town.

Not miserable. She keep reminding him, every time he needs it. Just bored. Itching to save lives and right wrongs. It sort of figures that, when Oliver Queen was finally ready to settle down, he’d be hopelessly in love with a real-life superhero: corporate CEO by day, vigilante hacker by night. He knows better than to think he could settle for anything less remarkable, but that doesn’t mean he can’t wish sometimes for something a little safer, a little slower.

They have Laurel and Thea over for dinner once they’ve unpacked the loft. Oliver cooks. Or, he tries to, but it’s like he left his kitchen mojo back with the picture-perfect neighbors and patio furniture. He burns the bread, scalds the sauce, and toughens the chicken to near inedibility.

Felicity tries to comfort him as best she can, he knows she can see the panic simmering under his frustration. “It’s just one dinner, Oliver. Just bad luck.” But when he sets the smoke detector off, she gives in and calls for takeout, ordering them Thai from Roy’s old favorite place. It’s so familiar, she doesn’t even need to see a menu for the number or ask around for individual orders. The casual familiarity sinks his stomach even lower.

They’ve been waiting for maybe ten minutes when Thea’s phone buzzes. His sister checks the thing for a split second before she stands to leave, surveying the room without really looking at anyone.

“Gotta go,” Her gaze is a little wild too, Oliver notices. “Thanks for dinner, guys. It was great.”

“Speedy…” It’s both a call and a question, though he’s got no idea what he’ll do or say if she agrees to stay.

“Hey, they don’t call me that for nothing.” She snaps her fingers at him as she turns for the door and the forced casualty tastes bitter in his mouth.

When he turns back to Laurel and Felicity, sitting side-by-side on the couch, they both look worried, but it’s Laurel who looks a little bit like she’s seen a ghost.

“Can we take a walk?”

It takes him a moment to realize she’s asking him, and he’s not ashamed at all when his eyes instinctively shoot to Felicity’s. He doesn’t seek her out for permission, but because she’s his port in the storm, his lighthouse, his rock. She meets his gaze and when the furrow in her brow relaxes, she gives him a little nod and they have one of those silent conversations they’ve already mastered.

_I’ll be back._

_I’ll be here._

He rides the elevator to the ground floor with Laurel in silence, as if it’s better to save the words until they’re out where the early fall breeze can blow them away into the night.

“It’s Thea,” Laurel starts as they start down the block and dread drops like a lead weight in his gut. He’s pushed it off, taken John’s bitter dismissal of his worry as simple assurance, but as soon as she says the words he knows his instinct was right. Things are worse than they seem.

 _“There’s something broken inside of me,”_ his sister had tried to tell him, last year, but it had been one of countless demons that hung above him at the time. She had tried to tell him, and he hadn’t done enough. He hadn’t done anything at all. And then he had left.

When he looks at Laurel, she’s watching him expectantly, and he realizes he hasn’t spoken.

“It’s bad.” The two syllables are the only ones that his lips will force out, and he can’t even make them sound like a question.

“She has good days and bad days,” Laurel nods. “Some days, she’s perfectly fine. Inexperienced, and a little over-aggressive, but fine.”

“And other days?” He asks the question knowing he’d give up almost anything not to hear the answer.

“Other days, it’s bad,” Laurel admits, a discernable shake in her tone. “Really bad. It’s like she can’t shut it off, even when the threat’s been neutralized, even when we’re home safe. I’m not sure if she’s sleeping, at all. And she talks…sometimes she talks like Roy’s still around, sometimes she talks about your mother…”

She trails off, and even as he feels every thread of happiness he’s been working so hard to stitch together go up in flames, even as his recently-acquired joy turns to ashes in his mouth, he knows there’s something more she’s not telling him.

“Come on, Laurel you gotta just…” There’s ripping off a bandaid and then there’s this. “If we’re gonna do this, if we’re gonna help her, you know I need to know everything.”

Laurel stops walking, wrapping her arms around herself for comfort, nodding in quick jerky movements. For one split second, she looks like the girl he knew all those lifetimes ago.

“She attacked me, one night.” Her voice is soft and vulnerable, but as soon as the words are out, it’s like she can read his thoughts. When she meets his eyes, the steel in her spine goes all the way up to her steady gaze. “John got her restrained, but it was…it was bad.”

“Why?” The question comes out like broken glass and it must cut her the same way, because she turns from him to keep walking.

“She was yelling at me, telling me it was my fault,” Laurel explains and if he didn’t know better, he’d swear she was close to sobbing. Come to think of it, maybe he doesn’t know better. “She said it was my fault you were gone.”

It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes any sense.

“She knew why we left town,” he furrows his brow, equal parts anguish and confusion. “She knew we left, she was there when…”

“Gone on the Gambit, Oliver,” Laurel interrupts, voice wild like she’s a little frantic. When it registers, he doesn’t blame her. “She thought you were still…”

Laurel chokes on the end of the sentence, but he’s not sure he could have beared to hear it, anyway. His mind has basically whited out, because watching a man kill someone with a wave of his hand has nothing on this kind of terror.

“Okay,” he says after a long moment, clearing the tears from his throat. “Okay.”

“We’ll get through this, Oliver,” she assures him, watching his reaction with a hand on his arm and voice that sounds less confident than either of them would like. Still, he has no choice but to believe her. “Just like everything else.”

She stops then, and he idly realizes they’re back at the front of his building. His old apartment, his new home, the place where his sister had bled out on the floor.

He hugs Laurel by way of goodbye when he realizes she isn’t coming back up and when he grates out a whispered “Thank you” in her ear, it might be the most genuine thing he’s ever said to her. It doesn’t surprise him, that she’s been the one to hold everything together. It just surprises him how long it’s taken him to realize that she always does.

* * *

It’s a massive, beautiful apartment, but it’s mostly empty and full of echoes, so when Felicity hears Oliver return from the second-floor master suite, the sound of the door closing and latching behind him is clear. But anticipation turns to concern when he doesn’t call out for her, and concern turns to panic when, moments later, a sickening splintering sound echoes through the loft.

“Oliver?” She’s out to the landing when she heads it again, and she looks down to see him hacking at the floor in front of the fireplace with the poker tool and something that looks like crowbar. _Where in the world did he get a crowbar?_

_“Oliver!”_

He won’t answer, even as she rushes down to him calling his name, just mumbles something about blood stains and every so often, his sister’s name, as he continues to destroy the beautiful hardwood.

Felicity should be wary of approaching him in this state, with tools in his hands that could easily become weapons, but the only thing she really fears is whatever’s got a hold of him. She tries a tactic that’s worked for her so far when he has a nightmare, pressing a hand to the back of his head and threading her fingers through his short-cropped hair, pulling almost too-tight.

“Oliver.” Finally, he registers the sound of his name and drops the tools, turning to slump to the ground. She climbs into his lap without hesitation, and she’s already taken out her contacts for the night, so she has to remove her glasses before she can press her forehead to him.

“Deep breaths.” She waits for his pulse to even out beneath her palms before she speaks again, slow and soft. “Will you come upstairs?”

In the bathroom of their master suite, she cleans and bandages his bloody knuckles as he stands by the sink, still silent. He doesn’t speak until they’re in the bedroom, forgoing changing to just collapse on his side of the bed. She pulls his shoes off before crawling in beside him, pressing the length of her body against his, like she knows she’s his security blanket.

“Our parents, they weren’t perfect,” he stops his first coherent words with a bitter laugh that jerks her head a little from where it’s settled on his chest and she understands. That might be the understatement of his lifetime. “I’m not even sure if they were good people, honestly, but they gave everything for us. And for what?”

“What are you talking about?” It’s the second time in so many weeks that he’s questioned his purpose and it makes her stomach turn. She knows this failure feels even more massive to him than Star City.

“They gave their lives for us,” he continues, “and what have we done, what have we become? We’re just…broken. Both of us, just broken.”

“Oliver.” He sounds so hopeless, so far away from the man she’s grown to know and love. She aches for that man, for just a second, knowing full well she’d move back to Ivy Town in a heartbeat, have brunch with the boring neighbors every weekend, if it meant she could bring that Oliver back. But they’re already on to about six new objectives, and the train hasn’t merely left the station, it nearly blew it to pieces. And she knows her role on this new team begins, but does not end, with being strong for him.

“You’re not broken.” He doesn’t even have time to fully scoff before she’s continuing, fisting her hand in his t-shirt. “Not any more than the rest of us anyway.”

“I don’t know how to help her,” he nearly sobs. “I’m too…I was supposed to be the worst of it. And it’s not like we can just tell people…”

He trails off and watches her like she can materialize an answer to the impossibility he’s posed. It’s a harsh and heartbreaking moment to realize it, but one of the ways she knows this is real love is that even unworkable hopes don’t feel like too much pressure when they come from him. It only serves to strengthen her for him, to reinforce them together. She realizes then that she’ll gladly live the rest of her life proving to him that he’s not the worst of anything.

“You know how they say it takes a village, right?” She feels the tension in him release just a little when she turns a sad smile up at him. It’s not much, but it’s a start. “Your city might be gone, but your village is still here. You’re not alone, Oliver. We’re right here, I’m right here.”

* * *

It takes him another three days to realize that, in cleaning up his mess, she had righted the coffee table, cleaning up the decorative bowl of glass beads that had scattered to the floor.

It’s not easy, being back.


End file.
